Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations

By Nikki Hessell

This book considers indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts in the British colonies. It argues that these translations uncover a latent discourse around colonisation in the original English texts. Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Robert Burns, and on Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, it provides the first scholarly insight into the reception of major Romantic authors in indigenous languages, and makes a major contribution to the study of global Romanticism and its colonial heritage. The book demonstrates the ways in which colonial controversies around prayer, song, hospitality, naming, mapping, architecture, and medicine are drawn out by translators to make connections between Romantic literature, its preoccupations, and debates in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial worlds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319709338

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© The Author(s) 2018

Nikki HessellRomantic Literature and the Colonised WorldPalgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Printhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70933-8_1

1. Introduction

Nikki Hessell¹ 

(1)

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Locations

When early nineteenth-century critics wished to indicate the potential influence and longevity of their favourite contemporary authors, they turned to the map of the colonised world. Felicia Hemans’s poetry was considered by the reviewers of Blackwood’s Magazine to have value not only in her own land, but wherever the English tongue is spoken, whether on the banks of the eastern Ganges, or the western Mississippi (Moir 1835, 96). Thomas De Quincey believed that Samuel Taylor Coleridge would shape generations yet to come, of our England at home, of our other England on the St Lawrence, on the Mississippi, on the Indus and Ganges, and on the pastoral solitudes of Austral climes (1891–1893, 2: 7) and wrote of William Wordsworth that throughout the countless myriads of future America and future Australia, no less than Polynesia and Southern Africa, there will be situations without end fitted by their loneliness to favour his influence for centuries to come… (1970, 144). James Currie thought that Robert Burns’s songs would be sung with equal or superior interest, on the banks of the Ganges or of the Mississippi, as on those of the Tay or the Tweed (1806, 1: 130n). And the politician Viscount Morpeth declared in a speech that Walter Scott was appreciated by colonial readers from the Thames to the Neva, from the Ganges to the Mississippi (cited in Trumpener 1997, 258). The authors thus praised were different, but the nature and terms of the praise were the same: literary success could be measured via geographic reach into the most unlikely locations.

Unlikely locations, perhaps, but not random ones. There are telling similarities in the examples cited above that suggest a collective understanding of the scope of British cultural influence globally. The territory that is being sketched here is repeatedly drawn with the Ganges and the Mississippi as its borders. It is a territory that consists, in part, of independent nations, and much of which would come to be marked in pink on maps showing the British Empire, but that already existed in the early nineteenth-century British mind as a surprisingly stable construct; as far away and as foreign as one could imagine, yet simultaneously bordered, fixed, knowable. Romantic literature would emanate out, from the Tay and the Tweed (and the Thames), from our England at home to a world of readers dispersed through time and space, but existing within a defined area: the Anglo-American colonised world.

These readers might be the settler populations, establishing new homes throughout what James Belich (2009) has termed the Anglo-world, or they might be the temporary administrators of colonies like India. Certainly these communities did take Romantic literature with them around the globe, as evidenced in the libraries, auction catalogues, and school rooms of the world; an 1849 advertisement in The New Zealander , for example, advertised works by Burns and Wordsworth alongside 1 crate COLONIAL CHEESE, 1 Case American Eight Day Clocks, and Tongues in small barrels. But the comments about Romantic authors cited above hint at another readership, not named but nevertheless present, since the English language was increasingly used by people who had only just encountered it. The equal or superior interest that the literary texts could claim in these new locales might not only have been that of those who brought the texts with them and to whom they were familiar, but those who read them with fresh eyes. Indigenous readers were encountering Romantic literature throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, they were not simply encountering that literature in English: across the colonised world, indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts were produced and disseminated, as a specifically indigenous print culture took hold.

English literature formed a central part of the colonial project. From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education, which prescribed the European canon and the English language as building blocks of the imperial education system in British India, to the curricula of the mission schools for indigenous children in the Pacific throughout the nineteenth century, English literary texts were synonymous with the experiences of colonisation.¹ Shakespeare and the Bible might have taken centre stage, but the major authors and texts of the Romantic period were also crucial to this project. For British administrators, settlers, and educators in the nineteenth century, Romantic texts represented some of the latest, most contemporary literary work. The poems of Felicia Hemans , Robert Burns , William Wordsworth , and John Keats , and the novels of Walter Scott , amongst other texts, travelled in the literal and figurative baggage of the diasporic British population . Improved transport networks and the flow of people and goods around the colonial world meant that books were arriving and departing all the time in places like Kolkata, Wellington, and Honolulu.² The rise of local printing industries, combined with the development of print runs in Britain aimed specifically at colonial markets, and the demands of newly established schools in the colonies, meant that one could find a Romantic text anywhere in the colonised world.³

Romantic scholarship has been considering indigenous peoples for some time. The earliest work in this area, such as Nigel Leask’s British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (1992),Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh’s 1996 edited volume Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, and Peter Kitson and Tim Fulford’s collection Romanticism and Colonialism (1998), tended to think of indigenous populations in their textual manifestations, examining the ways in which they were represented in the works of Romantic authors. More recent scholarship has considered actual indigenous people in the Romantic era, not simply literary characters, and has paid attention to their responses to Romantic literature; I am thinking here of critical works such as Tim Fulford’s Romantic Indians (2006) and Fulford and Kevin Hutchings’ collection Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750–1850 (2009). The indigenous responses in question, however, are all in English, and the indigenous thinkers who authored them are often speaking at least as much to the colonisers as the colonised. They also occupied a particular kind of space between two cultures. Figures like the Ojibwa writer Kahgegagahbowh George Copway and the Mohawk leader Teyoninhokarawen John Norton , both studied extensively by Fulford (2006), Hutchings (2009), and Kate Flint (2009), crossed over between the Native American and British worlds, producing writing in English that responded to British literature and that could be read by Anglophone readers. Scholars such as Manu Samriti Chander (2017) and Thomas C. Gannon (2009) have opened up new perspectives on British Romanticism’s influence on and overlaps with the work of colonised writers. But indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts offer a different avenue for examining the ways in which Romantic literature could be adapted to the literary traditions of colonised populations and speak to their concerns. They have the potential to resituate the critical discussion in ways that take account of new autonomous indigenous remakings of British literature, rather than simply the representation of indigenous peoples in that literature.

Indigenous translations also allow us to see how thoroughly Romantic literature was itself imbued with the discourses and experiences of colonisation. Scholars from Edward Said (1978) to Linda Colley (1992) have long since established that imperialism played a critical role in how Britain described itself and others, and that, as Bernard Cohn puts it, metropole and colony have to be seen in a unitary field of analysis (1996, 4). Romantic critics have subsequently deployed these ideas to show how colonisation dwells at the heart of the literature of the Romantic era.⁴ The argument of my book follows Saree Makdisi’s influential formulation of Romanticism as a cultural discourse defining the mutual constitution of the modern imperial metropolitan center and its antimodern colonies and peripheries (1998, 175). But it adds to Makdisi’s argument the important proposition that this mutual constitution was perceived by indigenous-language translators far earlier and more systematically than by modern Romantic critics. Poems like Wordsworth’s The Forsaken Indian Woman or Hemans’s The Indian with His Dead Child are clearly influenced by the colonial project, but so too is a host of much less obvious texts, shaped by what Evan Gottlieb dubs the global imaginary in Romantic literature, a force that can be felt regardless of whether the content of a given text is explicitly global (2015, xvi).

Indigenous-language translations unlock these latent aspects of Romantic discourse. When we read these more opaque texts in their indigenous translations, we are suddenly made aware of the colonial context submerged in the English original. Moreover, we can see that context while stepping outside the body of work that James Mulholland has brilliantly dubbed the archive of the inauthentic, those texts that ventriloquise or attempt to reconstitute an indigenous voice in English (2013b, 156). We have the opportunity to share in the knowledge that appears to have been so obvious to many indigenous-language translators in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Romantic literature frequently spoke to and described an array of colonial situations, situations that were often of relevance to indigenous readers , even in some of that literature’s most apparently domestic, local, or Eurocentric iterations. It was portable, in all the ways that the book historian Isabel Hofmeyr (2004) has used that term: Romantic literature literally travelled the globe, but also contained portable values, descriptions, and lessons.

The overlap between the Romantic and the colonial that I am describing here necessarily takes a narrow view of what constitutes both Romantic and colonial concerns. The shared situations, interests, and anxieties that this book investigates are primarily to do with loss, particularly around traditions, language, authority, and land. In Romantic-era Britain, these concerns were centered around displacements caused by war with America and then with France, the enclosure of land, industrialisation, the influx of new capital from overseas, and the subjugation of the Celtic fringe and its multiple traditions. As Katie Trumpener (1997) and others have pointed out, however, these discourses of loss were not simply domestic ones, but were fuelled by Britain’s imperial activities.⁵ They were always already concerned with colonisation, and thus it is perhaps unsurprising that those same discourses caught the eye of indigenous-language translators.

It is my contention that there are concordant moments at work here: the original moment of English composition, sometime in the Romantic period, and the moment of translation, sometime in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The Romantic moment is shot through with notes of colonisation, perhaps inevitably given the history of the period, and these notes are contained (and sometimes concealed) within the original English texts. In the moment of translation, the indigenous-language translator hears the echoes of those original notes and draws them out because they correspond with an urgent contemporary experience in the later colonial setting that needs to be thought through, explained, or examined, demonstrating what Hofmeyr has called virtual solidarity with the original version of the text (2004, 14). The translator reactivates something that was always there in the text, but does so from the other side of the colonial relationship. The translators are expert readers, in other words, of one or more of Romanticism’s most pressing concerns.

These strings of concordant moments serve as a potent reminder of the limitations of both literary and historical periodisation. A discussion at the 2017 American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conference highlighted how meaningless European notions of period can be for indigenous peoples and how distorting those period labels can be for indigenous histories. Centuries are based on the culturally-specific starting point of Christ’s birth and do not have the natural or universal application of a day or a month. To speak of the eighteenth or nineteenth century is to extend or (perhaps more likely) truncate indigenous experience. To put it another way, if Europeans arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand in the seventeenth century, and their descendants are still there, in what sense is the seventeenth century over? Might it not be more useful to think of the long-term chain of events that holds together the era of colonisation? In terms of literary history, might it not be more useful to think of an era such as the Romantic period as stretching out to include the history of Romanticism in the colonies?

Part of my aim in this book is to suggest that the Romantic period, as a unit of literary history, lasts well into the twentieth century in indigenous thought and intellectual activity, and that such a radical reinscribing of the boundaries of the Romantic period might be essential to comprehending the British texts of c.1789–1832 themselves. As Ted Underwood has shown, literary periodisation was part of a historical belief that different ages were separated by profoundly different, perhaps mutually incomprehensible, modes of life and thought (2013, 4). Indigenous translations of Romantic texts challenge that perspective in ways that support Underwood’s critique of periodisation. They suggest, first, that perhaps different ages are not mutually incomprehensible, not even in foreign tongues or across cultural borders, if there are central concepts or sentiments around which people continue to organise their thoughts. They also suggest that that perhaps the ages we think of as different from our own are in fact simply continuous with it, in both past and future, creating new ways of conceptualising what constitutes an age. Finally, and most radically, they suggest that these continuities might not simply explain the present, but might actually speak to the concerns of the past in ways that we have not recognised. In other words, it might not just be the case that we need to know the original Romantic text in order to understand the later indigenous translation. It might be equally true that we need to know the indigenous translation in order to understand the original Romantic text. The Romantic period might still be playing out, asynchronously, in parts of the world that the literary academy does not usually consider.

The translations that this book considers manifest Antoine Berman’s notion, adapted from Heidegger, of translation as the trial of the foreign (2004, 276). As Berman writes, this trial can exhibit the most singular power of the translating act: to reveal the foreign work’s most original kernel (2004, 276). An original kernel of these Romantic works, I intend to argue, is a meditation on colonisation, in some cases very deeply buried, but drawn to the surface by the act of translation.

It is now some time since David Simpson suggested that translation should be considered a core Romantic paradigm, but the challenges of considering Romanticism and translation have only been taken up sporadically or in narrowly focused ways (2005, 152). Translations of Scott and Burns have both received scholarly attention, although this is typically focused on European-language translations.⁶ A special issue of The Wordsworth Circle in 2008 on the theme of Romanticism, Reading, and Translation included contributions that considered European-language translations of the major Romantic authors, or those authors’ work as translators. In this issue, Frederick Burwick tackled the link between translation and colonisation in the period, but he confined his discussion to the important question of English-language translations of indigenous texts (2008, 70). Simpson has also expanded his idea of the translation paradigm in a chapter of Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, with reference to the way in which material from indigenous languages influenced English verse in the period (2013, esp. 167–78). The reverse process has not been considered, but it opens up an intriguing new space in which to consider the ways in which this core Romantic paradigm might be articulated.

The overwhelming obstacle to examining this articulation is the profoundly limited linguistic, cultural, and methodological competencies of those of us who teach Romantic literature in Western universities, a point made by Nigel Leask in 1992 but not yet adequately addressed in the field. It is important at this point, then, to clarify how the research for this book was undertaken, how it is organised, and in what role I am casting myself. I initially identified a range of indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts, some produced as stand-alone publications and some printed in newspapers. These texts were identifiable due to careful cataloguing that captured the content and source of the translated texts, or because the names of the Romantic authors were retained in English in the published versions.

I decided to limit the time frame covered by my project to 1850–1939. The first date simply reflected the earliest point at which such translations seemed to have emerged. The later date was chosen to keep the focus on early indigenous-language responses, rather than those that might be classed as post-colonial, which would raise issues beyond the scope of this project. With the help of expert linguists, I developed an understanding of what the translated texts said and, in particular, where they diverged from the original English versions or made use of literary or linguistic features that were especially significant in the indigenous language in question.

It was these moments, where the translated text appeared to move away from the original in terms of meaning or form, that particularly interested me. Investigating them further, I began to realise that, while they seemed on the surface to be instances of divergence, perhaps even to the point of distorting or misreading the text, they in fact typically pointed to a deep engagement with the English originals and their colonial subtexts. There were, of course, less telling moments of divergence; for example, the decision to use the more specific pōtiki (youngest child) in place of Felicia Hemans’s child in a Māori translation of her poem The Hour of Prayer makes sense in terms of the regularity of the meter in the Māori version, which requires three syllables to end the line in question . But many of the moments of free translation or invocation of apparently incongruous traditional literary or linguistic features were like signposts to the key colonial themes in the English texts; they appeared where they did precisely because the translator seemed to identify a theme of profound contemporary significance and developed it in the newly translated version.

This book is in no way an attempt to come to terms with the full literary significance of the indigenous-language texts within their own language or literary tradition, nor to evaluate them as literary translations in the round. The texts I have selected represent only a subset of the indigenous translations I encountered in my research, and only a fraction of those that no doubt exist around the world. Moreover, I have chosen to focus my discussion simply on the points of divergence or particular local significance in the colonial context. The book does not aim to be a contribution to the field of translation studies, although it is informed by that discipline and its sophisticated considerations of the act of translating. Rather, my book is concerned with a few important moments in some selected translations, in which the translators’ decisions shed light on the texts’ key themes or preoccupations, in ways that can send us back to the original moments of composition, and the original English texts, with a new appreciation for their subtlety.

This approach reflects the significant ethical question that white researchers in the Western academy must confront when they handle indigenous material. I am a Pākehā New Zealander (a New Zealander of European descent), who is also the mother of bilingual Māori children. I am acutely conscious of the role of my own ancestors in the colonisation of both Aotearoa New Zealand and India: several generations of my family were involved in both colonial endeavours. It is partly because of the discourses around colonisation in my own country that I have chosen to use the word indigenous rather than native in this book, given the problematic history of the latter term in Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history. I am also aware of the deserved criticism that is directed at white researchers, in Aotearoa New Zealand and elsewhere, who use indigenous material without consultation, without expert advice, and without providing any benefit to indigenous communities via their research.⁷ Translation has a particularly charged role in this history, often contributing to the violent distortion of indigenous ideas and the plundering of traditional knowledge, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and others have argued so convincingly.⁸

The design of this project reflects my attempts to mitigate some of these harmful effects. First of all, I am reversing the process that Spivak has called translation-as-violation, and looking at indigenous appropriations of British texts rather than the opposite (1999, 162–64). This reversal does not completely efface the question of violence, of course; English-language texts were available to indigenous translators as a direct result of colonisation, and in many cases, the process by which the English language and its literature were introduced into a colonised space was intensely violent and destructive.⁹ B ut the reversal does at least provide a degree of space for indigenous voices to speak within the context of contemporary scholarship about colonisation and Romantic literature. Although my study falls well short of the models laid out in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), it has been conceived with her lessons in mind. I have consulted with people from indigenous communities as translators, linguists, and experts; in most cases, I have paid for this service to ensure that the resources that I have access to are benefitting indigenous communities, although some colleagues have generously donated their time or offered their advice without compensation.¹⁰ Whenever possible, the research in this book has been jointly presented by these translators and me in conference papers and other presentations and dialogues.¹¹ Wherever possible, my knowledge about indigenous languages and traditions has been sourced from indigenous scholars, thinkers, writers, and storytellers, rather than those who write about or in spite of them. I have tried not to act as one of the researchers that Vilsoni Hereniko has described, who seem to think they have the right to express opinions (sometimes labeled truths) about cultures that are not their own in such a way that they appear to know it from the inside out (2000, 86). One thing is certain: I do not know these cultures from the inside out.

But I do know my own culture, its literature, and its concerns, in just this way, and so have chosen to position myself not as an expert on indigenous print culture or indigenous languages, but on British Romanticism. This is where my training and expertise lies; moreover, this is the literature I inherited from my ancestors and about which I am entitled to speak. I have learned a great deal from observing how scholars in a similar position, such as Cristina Bacchilega, position themselves and think through their ethical responsibilities (2007, 23, 27–28). Bacchilega cites a pertinent comment by one of her colleagues, the historian Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa, on the subject of studying Hawaiian stories: ‘Don’t become us. Honor your own ancestors. But learn about the land and the language, for there is no Hawaiian sense of place without Hawaiians’ (2007, 27–28). This book reflects a desire to honour my own ancestors, and the contribution that the book attempts to make is thus to British Romantic studies rather than indigenous studies. I have used the word we throughout this book, and the we to which I refer comprises other scholars working in Western universities or readers trained in the Western tradition. The result is that this book looks at indigenous translations for the lessons they can teach us about the original English literary texts, and each chapter returns to a detailed reconsideration of the relevant text and the scholarship around it in light of those lessons. The book does not provide a comprehensive history of the reception of each translated text or a detailed assessment of it as a piece of indigenous print culture. It also does not argue that these are necessarily significant texts in the history of indigenous print culture; instead it posits that they are examples of sophisticated readings of what, in many cases, Romantic literature is really about, the kernel that Berman identifies, seen through the eyes of translators who recognised the latent colonial discourse in the text.

All of which might sound like a familiar scenario: a white researcher uses indigenous print culture simply in order to talk more about British literature and to put it at the heart of her discussion, marginalising the indigenous voices that produced the work, and to speak primarily to other researchers in her own field or readers from her own cultural background. This is so, but it is a decision based on an awareness of my own limitations, and the community to and for which I have the right to speak. In the vast field of indigenous print culture, the texts considered in this book are single, perhaps minor moments. But with my cultural background, these are the moments that spoke to me and about which I had something to say. Paulette Regan (2011) has written eloquently about the need for unsettling the settler within. My attempt to unsettle myself has involved re-reading the literature of my own culture through indigenous eyes and doing what I can to receive the gifts of knowledge provided by indigenous-language translators, past and present. What I most notice is how much more cogently they read a key aspect of Romantic literature than we have done to date, how aware they were, approximately one hundred years before the Western academy caught up with the news, that Romantic literature spoke to the experience of colonisation.

Reinscribing Romanticism

Lawrence Venuti has argued that translation always involves a reinscription of the original, in which domestic discourses are used so that the translated text is made to bear other domestic meanings and to serve other domestic interests (2004, 482–83).¹² The translations that this project considers certainly reflect this domesticating impulse, drawing attention to a host of local political and artistic concerns. Yet they also operate in a way that adds an additional layer to what Venuti is proposing, because the experience of colonisation is, in the end, not simply a domestic experience. Indigenous peoples shared the experience of colonisation with the colonisers, albeit in a deeply asymmetric relationship. To talk about domestic concerns in colonised communities is, in almost every conceivable instance, to talk about the colonisers too, including their culture and their experiences. The legacy of colonisation is the almost total erasure of the purely domestic, in the sense that Venuti uses the word; it is a legacy of perpetual entwinement, for better or worse, in which the imperial experience is, as Edward Said suggested, held in common by the two sides (1994, xxii). The domestic inscriptions provided by the indigenous-language translators considered in this book are thus more like reinscriptions, a rewriting of a complex dialogue, told from the other side.

The decision to translate is itself a strategic one, as Venuti argues . It suggests that there was something to be expressed about the texts that was not available through the original English version, or that there was a domestic reinscription that needed to occur. The mere existence of indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts modifies some of the thinking that has shaped considerations of colonisation and translation to date, such as Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi’s influential assessment:

The close relationship between colonization and translation has come under scrutiny; we can now perceive the extent to which translation was for centuries a one-way process, with texts being translated into European languages for European consumption, rather than as part of a reciprocal process of exchange. European norms have dominated literary production, and those norms have ensured that only certain kinds of text, those that will not prove alien to the receiving culture, come to be translated. (1999, 5)

But the unidirectional model that Bassnett and Trivedi assume is not applicable in all instances, and Romantic literature is one of those corpuses that did in fact participate in a reciprocal process of exchange.

There are a number of trans- terms that inform my discussion of this process, beginning with Chadwick Allen’s idea of trans-indigenous discourse. (As Allen suggests, "trans- could be the new post-") (2012, xv). Allen’s idea of purposeful Indigenous juxtapositions that are located firmly in the specificity of the Indigenous local while remaining always cognizant of the complexity of the relevant Indigenous global has guided my consideration of the ways in which different, localised indigenous responses to Romanticism might add up to a coherent global response (2012, xix). Mary Louise Pratt’s transculturation, meanwhile, has provided a series of questions that my project, within the limited sphere of British Romantic studies, aims to answer: What do people on the receiving end of empire do with metropolitan modes of representation? How do they appropriate them? How do they talk back? What materials can one study to answer those questions? (2008, 7–8). Likewise, Harish Trivedi’s description of literary relations between Britain and India as a transaction—what he defines as a process involving complex negotiation and exchange, including some ‘give’ or accommodative resilience on both sides to facilitate give and take—is one that my book aims to take beyond the Indian Ocean and apply to the colonised world more generally (1995, 1).

The final trans- term that informs this study is James Clifford’s concept of the translocal, which permits ideas focused on a particular local setting to be reused and reimagined in other, different, local environments (1997, 7). In Romantic studies, James Mulholland has already deployed translocalism as a way to transcend time and space in the way that we read Romantic literature (2013a, 121).¹³ Translocalism helps to explain how and why a text that is local to the nineteenth-century Lake District, such as Wordsworth’s Michael, can be made equally local to readers in twentieth-century southern India. Romanticism’s reach into the colonised world requires such creative interpretations of space and time if it is to be comprehended; it is noticeable that the reviewers’ praise for Scott, Coleridge, Burns, Hemans, and Wordsworth that I cited at the start of this introduction includes the certainty that their influence will stretch not only across geographic space, but also across time for centuries and generations, through future iterations of existing colonised spaces. Translocalism allows for the links between different indigenous responses globally, and between indigenous responses and the original Romantic texts, in a series of discrete but connected